This is a comment I made on the post on vengeance.

I think this is helpful not just in extreme examples such as genocide, but also in the much more common relational conflicts we ALL experience at church, at home and at work.

If you watch people in conflict you note that there is usually an initiating incident where someone is hurt or embarrassed or shamed. This incident may have been intentional or accidental but in any case someone is hurt. Our instinctive response is to become defensive and to seek some form or retaliation. This retaliation is commonly verbal or passive-aggressive. We feel that we have been treated unjustly (and maybe we have!) and we take it upon ourselves to make it right. The difficulty is that in the vast majority of cases we don’t bring justice, we just initiate a cycle of retribution and the conflict continues to escalate and deepen until community is broken. Sometimes intervention happens successfully by an outside party and the conflict is defused, sometimes one party just decides the fight isn’t worthy it and it ends, but often real damage is done permanently.

If you are grieved party (and often both sides would identify themselves as such) how can you find the resources to stop pursuing “justice” and reconcile? It involves absorbing the blow (Tim Keller often relates this with substitutionary atonement) and releasing the opposite party from your debt (forgiveness). Is justice violated in this? Not if you can offload your internal demand for justice and give it to God.

In order to satisfactorily process this in your heart without internalizing victimhood you need two things: a resource pool from which to draw the generosity needed to extend grace to the undeserving (even if their status of undeserving is only imagined in your heart) AND a faith that ultimately justice will be served. The gospel give us both of these things. The resource pool is we draw on is the generosity of God in Christ to forgive the far greater offenses we have committed, and the justice consolation is the knowledge that vengeance belongs to God. He will ultimately judge with pure justice, not the revenge driven stuff we generate ourselves that repeated sets up cycles of retribution.

In this way knowledge that the creator is a God of vengeance combined with knowledge that he is also a God of grace can not only help us defuse large uncommon offenses but also the small every day ones we all experience.